Race and Modern Republicans Once Again

Ross Douthat, I think, gets this wrong:

The GOP and the Race Issue: Southern whites were, and are, natural conservatives who happened to find themselves in the more liberal of the two parties; once Democrats associated themselves with the civil-rights movement, there wasn't anywhere else for white Mississippians and Alabamans to go except the GOP. Gerard Alexander's essay on "The Myth of the Racist Republicans" goes further than I would in downplaying Republican racism, but I think his point on this score is basically right:

Liberal commentators ... assume that if many former Wallace voters ended up voting Republican in the 1970s and beyond, it had to be because Republicans went to the segregationist mountain, rather than the mountain coming to them. There are two reasons to question this assumption. The first is the logic of electoral competition. Extremist voters usually have little choice but to vote for a major party which they consider at best the lesser of two evils, one that offers them little of what they truly desire. Segregationists were in this position after 1968, when Wallace won less than 9% of the electoral college and Nixon became president anyway, without their votes. Segregationists simply had very limited national bargaining power. In the end, not the Deep South but the GOP was the mountain.

Second, this was borne out in how little the GOP had to "offer," so to speak, segregationists for their support after 1968, even according to the myth's own terms. Segregationists wanted policies that privileged whites. In the GOP, they had to settle for relatively race-neutral policies: opposition to forced busing and reluctant coexistence with affirmative action. The reason these policies aren't plausible codes for real racism is that they aren't the equivalents of discrimination, much less of segregation.

... Kevin Phillips was hardly coy about this in his Emerging Republican Majority. He wrote in 1969 that Nixon did not "have to bid much ideologically" to get Wallace's electorate, given its limited power, and that moderation was far more promising for the GOP than anything even approaching a racialist strategy. While "the Republican Party cannot go to the Deep South"-—meaning the GOP simply would not offer the policies that whites there seemed to desire most—"the Deep South must soon go to the national GOP," regardless.

So the GOP ended up bidding race-neutrality - which a conservative party would have naturally favored anyway, and which is not racism - and symbolic gestures like Reagan's opposition to MLK Day, his support for Bob Jones University's tax exemption, and so forth. These code words and gestures were real and shameful, and contemporary apologies like Ken Mehlman's mea culpa are entirely appropriate. But more often than not, I would submit, pundits who harp on this shame tend to do so because it's an easy way to leap to Krugman's conclusion that race explains everything he doesn't like about contemporary American politics, when in fact an awful lot of it is explained by the fecklessness of his liberal forebears.

Paul Krugman has a very effective counter to this:

White male math - Paul Krugman - Op-Ed Columnist - New York Times Blog: In some correspondence with Larry Bartels, whose “What’s the matter with “What’s the matter with Kansas?”" is must reading for anyone trying to understand modern American political, economy, the issue of how the Democrats lost white males came up. Larry points out that you really need to separate out the South. Here’s what he had to say:

Unless you have a peculiar nostalgia for the racially coercive Democratic monopoly of the Jim Crow era, it makes sense to focus on the rest of the country. There, the Democratic share of the two-party presidential vote among white men was 40% in 1952 and 39% in 2004.

White men didn’t turn against the Democrats; Southern white men turned against the Democrats. End of story.

It's not that feckless liberals alienated their previous natural supporters--it's not the case that, as Ronald Reagan liked to claim, "the Democratic Party left me." It is the case that southern white males left the Democratic Party. Northern white males still seem to like the liberal Democratic Party just fine.

Once "feckless liberals" are off the table, Ross seems to want to make two arguments:

1. The Republicans didn't really play the race card ("the GOP ended up bidding race-neutrality... which is not racism - and symbolic gestures like Reagan's opposition to MLK Day, his support for Bob Jones University's tax exemption...").

2. It did not really matter that Republicans played the race card ("Southern whites were, and are, natural conservatives... once Democrats associated themselves with the civil-rights movement, there wasn't anywhere else for white Mississippians and Alabamans to go except the GOP...").

I think that there is a very good counter to Douthat's (1): if the Republican Party really were bidding race-neutrality--if there platform were one of market opportunity plus respect for the family plus respect for the church plus civil order plus race neutrality--they would get an enormous number of African-American votes. African-American voters are more often than not social conservative. African-American voters are extremely eager to support politicians who genuinely fight and reduce crime. Jack Kemp's Republican Party--one that is truly race-neutral, committed to equality of opportunity, and social conservative--is a natural home for most African-American voters. But we do not have that Republican Party, do we? African-American voters believe that the GOP bids racism, and few who have seen George Allen or Trent Lott on YouTube can disagree.

I think Douthat is wrong about (2) as well: it matters that the Republican Party played (and plays) the race card. A Republican Party that was socially conservative and economically classical liberal and retained its long-ago commitment to equality of opportunity--that remembered that it was Abraham Lincoln who freed the slaves--would be a very different Republican Party than the one we see now: it would still have its soul.

Comments

[steve]

They weren't exactly conservative when they were supporting Huey Long and FDR, or earlier when they were often Populists. They are only "conservative" in trying to support the fabled Southern way of life - keeping blacks in their place, anti-immigrant, anti-catholic, etc

[bigTom]

I don't think its quite as clearcut as you make it out to be. The Repubs promote policies that sound race-neutral to anyone unaware of how our society actually operates. I doubt that most of their supporters think their policies are anything but fair. Similarly with their voter suppression efforts. These are carefully crafted as measures to promote a level playing field. The fact they they are only promoting policies which have been carefully designed to skew the voting public towards the conservative end is not immediately obvious from the laws/policies themselves, but must be teased out by careful analysis. Sadly this is beyond most voters.

Things like bussing, and affirmative action could reasonably be considered to be a cure worse than the disease, at least to most subburban whites, and therefore an example of "feckless liberalism" in action.

[david]

"Jack Kemp's Republican Party--one that is truly race-neutral, committed to equality of opportunity, and social conservative--is a natural home for most African-American voters."

There's a lot wrong with this sentence.

[ed]

Trent Lott and George Allen's relatively recent overt and wildly racist moments ought to have ended this discussion before it ever got started.

[Michael Cain]

"Northern white males still seem to like the liberal Democratic Party just fine."

Given the quoted figures -- 40% in 1952 and 39% in 2004 -- this statement strikes me as just a bit optimistic. The majority of Northern white males did not prefer the liberal Democratic Party at either point. And given that both parties are more conservative now than they were then, the "liberal Democratic Party" has had to become less liberal in order to hold onto the same fraction of that group.

[David J. Balan]

It is true that the most unarguable pro-black legal changes had already been made in the mid-1960s, and that the policies that were being proposed by the late 1960s were less clear cut and could, in principle, have been opposed by a non-racist. But the actual Southern whites who were opposed the latter also opposed the former, and for the same reasons. And these were the people who Southern Stragegy Republicans were trying to appeal to.

This was not at all harmless; the idea of a genuinely pro-black public policy that wasn't dominated by bad ideas like bussing was dealt a huge blow by the fact that the people who most vocally opposed those policies were those who were obviously simple racists, not well-meaning dissenters.

[Kate G.]

I think douthat's "we promoted race neutral policies" and the "racists had to settle for them since we weren't going to give them real segregation and bigotry..." boils down to

"we got your votes *suckah's!* and we didn't do sh*t for them! We promised you a white supremacist heaven and we didn't even deliver."

Where have I heard that strategy before? Oh, yes! its the republican war on poor women. First, they campaign on an anti abortion platform. Then, they fail to deliver so that they can continue to send out hysterical appeals for money on the basis of their failure to deliver their promised anti-woman policies.

And where else have I heard this line of argument before? Why, as a mid-term middle brow explanation of why the Iraq war couldn't possibly have been waged because we wanted control of their oil--because we wound up botching the war and driving the price of oil up!

As Atrios so trenchantly observes the main thing is that everythign is always good for the republicans. Even when they are too cowardly to actually avow their own racist policies in other than code words that just shows they were really race neutral all along!

Kate G.

[rea]

"a smear campaign . . . portrayed race-neutrality as a smokescreen or "code-word" for racism . . ."

In a segregated society, so-called "race-neutral" policies as practiced by the Republican Party, like opposition to affirmative action or to desegregation of schools by busing, amount to perpetuation of the racist, segregated status quo.

"The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread."--A. France

[anne]

"Southern whites were, and are, natural conservatives who happened to find themselves in the more liberal of the two parties...."

"Northern Hispanics were, and are, natural conservatives who happened to find themselves in the more liberal of the two parties...."

"Eastern Asians were, and are, natural conservatives who happened to find themselves in the more liberal of the two parties...."

"Western African were, and are, natural conservatives who happened to find themselves in the more liberal of the two parties...."

Among the stupidest phrases ever written. Typical Ross Douthat.

[anne]

"Why should many African-Americans have found a home in the Republican party when a smear campaign (which is apparently alive and well today) portrayed race-neutrality as a smokescreen or 'code-word' for racism?"

Because this is rubbish, and African Americans know this is rubbish.

[anne]

"Why should 'an enormous number of African-Americans' have embraced race-neutrality when Democrats outbid Republicans by peddling racial preferences?"

Because African Americans know what this sort of lying Republican rubbish is all about.

[John Emerson]

Ian: George Allen and Trent Lott were major figures, and You can't treat them as peripheral -- Allen was expected to run for President. Your indignation is really silly. The party you've choice to join is what it is.

The word racism, can mean lots of things, but there's a well-defined definition which has been tested. Opposition to interracial marriage is racist by any standard, n Alabama 42% of the voters voted against an amendment legalizing interracial marriage. Further analysis could probably show who voted which way, and my bet is that it was mostly white Republicans who voted against the amendment. (Someone should do the research). Republicans have done all kinds of little symbolic things to make sure they get that 42% chunk (and similar chunks in other states, North and South).

Even if the Republicans did nothing racist policywise, their continual use of racist images and codewords made this country a worse, nastier place. That's not the only thing nasty they do -- look at the collected sayings of Delay and Gingrich for more -- but it's probably the nastiest. And these same people, Douthat included, often make whiny remarks about Democratic nastiness or the general nasty topne of American politics. That's really brazen.

I don't really doubt the sincerity of Douthat's conservativism, but he's stuck defending a weakly conservative political party which has been taken over by criminals and extremists, and that's an impossible task. But because he's a conservative, he (like Megan McArdle) has been promoted far beyond what his abilities can justify.

[John Emerson]

Should be:

Ian: George Allen and Trent Lott were major figures, and you can't treat them as peripheral -- Allen was expected to run for President. Your indignation is really silly. The party you've chosen to join is what it is.

The word racism is poorly defined, but one well-defined kind of racism has been empirically measured.

[Colin Danby]

And just possibly, Ian, black folks are not the idiots you make them out to be, easily manipulated and led.

Brad's position unless I grossly misunderstand him is not that there are no decent Republicans. I don't see him writing about "the true feelings of most Republicans." (But Brad writes more than I can read so who knows -- you got a url?)

It is an all-too-common tactic to respond to a structural criticism by reinterpreting it as a personal attack, and throwing a fit.

[Rob]

The Democrats were not the party that put a man who did his best to keep blacks Separate but Equal on the Supreme Court. William Rehnquist existed, Nixon put him on the court and Regan made him Chief Justice.

[Bernard Yomtov]

"Opposition to interracial marriage is racist by any standard, n Alabama 42% of the voters voted against an amendment legalizing interracial marriage. Further analysis could probably show who voted which way, and my bet is that it was mostly white Republicans who voted against the amendment. (Someone should do the research)."

The amendment passed on the strength of overwhelming support in Jefferson County (Birmingham). In rural, heavily white, areas it fared badly.

Let's not forget also that in 1991 David Duke was able to get 700,000 votes for governor, with the bulk of his support coming from northern LA, that is to say the heavily Republican areas.

As someone who lived in the south in the era being discussed, I certainly agree that race was a huge factor in turning the region Republican. But don't overlook the importance of Vietnam. Southerners were strongly pro-war, and McGovern was not going to get a lot of southern votes in any event.

[David Lloyd-Jones]

You're right: the guy couldn't be more wrong.

The red states today are that for good reason: they're the ones where the Socialist Party got the heavy votes a hundred years ago: Arkansas, Nebraska, Kansas, and on and on.

Your problem with progressive movements is that when they succeed they produce contentment, which leads to the liquidation of the progressive impulse. That's why Teamsters vote Republican: they've got good heavy pensions to look after. And the Great Plains: the got their loose money, including tailored regional Federal Reserve branches, and they got all the subsidies the Farmers' Union could ever have wished for.

Small problem is, the policies they asked for lead to the industrial farm, not the support of family farming.

Oh, well. Back to the drawing board...

[Measure for Measure]

What we need is a better quality conservative.

A better quality conservative would be reality -based, though despite the examples of some fine economists I still don't have a sharp idea what they would look like.

"A Republican Party that was socially conservative and economically classical liberal and retained its long-ago commitment to equality of opportunity--that remembered that it was Abraham Lincoln who freed the slaves--would be a very different Republican Party than the one we see now: it would still have its soul."

If you believe Krugman, a Republican party that could not play the race card could not successfully push a tax-cuts always and forever policy.

So if the Republican Party still possessed its soul, what would its members in Congress push for?

Bill Clinton took over the good-government / Hamiltonian section of the ideological plane. Given that, I'm still not sure what a politically-viable, reality-based and responsible Republican would look like today.

[anne]

What I am reminded of is what the sheer fear must have been like, living in Mississippi during the Jim Crow era and through civil rights era....

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/17/opinion/lweb17herbert.html

Reagan in Neshoba

To the Editor:

"Righting Reagan's Wrongs?": *

Like Bob Herbert, I am appalled by an attempted revisionism of Ronald Reagan's appearance in Neshoba County, Mississippi.

In 1964, I was in the Air Force stationed in Biloxi. The murders of those three civil rights activists was frightening for a farm boy from Oregon, and drove me into civil rights actions. I'd witnessed virulent hate and racism for a couple of years.

As part of a college course, I interviewed a few public officials, including a district attorney. His first statement to me was "I hope you're not one of those outside agitators who don't believe in states' rights."

Ronald Reagan's very appearance in Neshoba County was transparently racist. His use of the code "states' rights" pandered to white supremacists. Republicans should face it: the Teflon is chipping off.

Max White
Portland, Ore., Nov. 14, 2007

* http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/13/opinion/13herbert.html

[anne]

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/15/opinion/l15herbert.html

Reagan in Philadelphia, Miss.: The Sequel

To the Editor:

Bob Herbert ("Righting Reagan's Wrongs?") could not be more correct in writing that "Reagan apologists ... have no right to change the meaning" of his appearance at the Neshoba County Fair to kick off his 1980 campaign. If anyone doubts this, simply get out a map and find Philadelphia, Miss.

One does not simply fly in and out of that town as if it were New York. One must truly go out of one's way, in both a physical as well as a psychological sense, to arrive there. Ronald Reagan knew exactly what he was doing, and to view it as anything other than an appeal to racism one must be told, "There you go again."

Larry Barkan
Tempe, Ariz., Nov. 13, 2007

•

To the Editor:

The racial appeal in Ronald Reagan's visit to the Neshoba County Fair in 1980 is unambiguous. It was part of a Republican strategy to win white Democratic converts. Consider a letter that Michael Retzer, the Mississippi national committeeman, wrote in December 1979 to the Republican National Committee.

The national committee was polling state leaders for venues where the Republican nominee might speak, and Mr. Retzer pointed to the Neshoba County Fair as ideal for winning what he called "George Wallace-inclined voters."

This was not just a Southern strategy. Throughout his career, Mr. Reagan benefited from divisive appeals to whites who resented efforts to reverse historic patterns of racial discrimination.

He did it in 1966 when he campaigned for the California governorship by denouncing open housing laws. He did it in 1976 by attacking welfare in subtly racist terms. And he clearly did it in Neshoba County in 1980.

Joseph Crespino
Atlanta, Nov. 14, 2007
The writer teaches history at Emory University and is the author of "In Search of Another Country: Mississippi and the Conservative Counterrevolution."

[anne]

Just last night, I heard the Governor of Mississippi * who was granted the right by George Bush to set aside the government rule that 50% of assistance for recovery from hurricane Katrina be extended to lower income residents praise the recognition of "states' rights."

* http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2007/04/falling_indicat.html

April 23, 2007

Falling Indicators of Human Development in Mississippi
By Brad DeLong

Governor Haley Barbour manages to achieve a thing that many corrupt dictators have not: to lower the Human Development Index of the people he governs....

There are 2.8 million people in Mississippi. About 15% of the non-elderly population--make that 350,000--were on Medicaid. Cut Medicaid enrollments by 50,000, by 1/7. 42,000 babies born in Mississippi each year. For the share who die to jump from 0.97% to 1.14%... That's a less than 1/3000 chance. That's worth saying.

[anne]

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/16/us/16mississippi.html

November 16, 2007

Poor Lag in Hurricane Aid From Mississippi
By LESLIE EATON

GULFPORT, Miss. — Like the other Gulf Coast states battered by Hurricane Katrina, Mississippi was required by Congress to spend half of its billions in federal grant money to help low-income citizens trying to recover from the storm.

But so far, the state has spent $1.7 billion in federal money on programs that have mostly benefited relatively affluent residents and big businesses. The money has gone to compensate many middle- and upper-income homeowners, to aid utility companies whose equipment was damaged and to prop up the state's insurance system.

Just $167 million, or about 10 percent of the federal money, has been spent on programs dedicated to helping the poor, mostly through a smaller grant program for lower-income homeowners....

[John Emerson]

The red states today are that for good reason: they're the ones where the Socialist Party got the heavy votes a hundred years ago: Arkansas, Nebraska, Kansas, and on and on.

Bad guess. Minnesota had a Socialist governor 77 years ago, and it's still pretty much Democratic (not as much so as 20 years ago, though).

The Farmer-Labor party was not explicitly socialist, but its leader, Governor Floyd B. Olson, described himself as a Socialist. He was a successful multi-term governor who died in office, and he transformed the state.

[Kate G.]

I wasn't aware that Arkansas, Nebraska and Kansas had "heavy teamster" presence who look upon republican policies as a way of "protecting their pensions." What on earth does that mean, really? How would voting republican protect pensions and voting democratic negatively affect pensions? You seem to be completely ignorant of the union busting side of republican policies--does the word PATCO ring a bell? There's a reason why Unions have historically turned out for democratic candidates and its not because voting for socialism in some dim past gave them everythign they wanted. Au contraire, its because long term republican attempts to separate union members from the interests of the union by appealing directly to their racism and their fear of non union/non white workers has failed. When that didn't work the republicans went full tilt at union busting and now can try to segregate the work force by appeals to nativist/anti immigrant fervor with impunity.

Kate G.

[Jose Padilla]

If the white male vote stayed the same outside the South, why have the Republicans been so successful for the last 40 years? After all, they gained the South, but they've lost a lot of the West (including California) and all of New England (States like Maine and New York used to be Republican). The reason is that the population of the South has grown a great deal in the last 40 years and has more electoral power. The 50-year-old white male voter in Florida or Georgia or Texas may well have been born in New Jersey or Pennsylvania or New York. Did the South attract the more, er, racially insensitive white males from other parts of the country? Maybe. The Reagan Democrat phenomenon was a real one.

[Kate G.]

Jose Padilla,
What's your point? That white guys from the northeast and elsewhere in the country *switched parties* to vote for Reagan? Absolutely. The argument that the Republicans had a sucessful southern strategy of attracting confederate sympathizers and modern day racists in the south doesn't mean they *didn't have the exact same strategy* in the North and mid-west. They did. And it worked. See--it moved bigots out of the democratic party and into the Republican party. That's what we are arguing.

Bob Herbert, and others, have pointed out the ways in which the racist appeals (and the language of state's rights) was tailored specifically to the south and the way other kinds of coded appeals were used in the north and mid-west. He specifically pointed to Reagan's use of terms like "young buck" in southern enclaves and some less raced term in northern ones.

For an interesting historical analysis of the ways in which the great "lost cause" of the south has been retrojected into non-southern communities and the way race and racism have been obscured even as they are manipulated I recommend "Confederates in the Attic" which has a fascinating chapter on a town that went for the north in the original civil war that rewrites history to imagine itself as a confederate stronghold in the post civil rights era.

I'd also like to recommend "Canarsie" a study of race baiting and block busting and racial politics in New York under Nixon. To say that southern voters, and specifically southern male voters, are significantly more racist than northern or midwestern ones isn't to hypothesize some strange attractor where all the racists in the country flow south--its simply to say that the multi ethnic northeast and the staunchly white/native american mid and far west display their racial issues in a different manner and that the racist vote needs to be captured and organized and channelled in a different way with different imagery.

Kate G.

[jim]

You could know perfectly well that the GOP is anti-Black simply from its appointment of two window-dressing Blacks (Rice and Powell, both ineffectual and sidelined) to very visible positions. Ditto with its preemption of the "Black seat" on the Supreme Court with an Uncle Tom-ish Black who goes along with the most conservatives justices on the court. If it were genuinely pro-Black it would not have to cover its true nature in these deceitful ways since there would be no question about where it stood.

[wood turtle]

I think the Republicans have a soul. They just are needing a rest.